Could love be classified as a mental illness?

Absolutely. “…if we take the symptoms of falling in love and check them against accepted diagnostic criteria for mental illness, we find that most ‘lovers’ qualify for diagnoses of obsessional illness, depression or manic depression.”

In the book Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness, Frank Tallis writes that if we take the symptoms of falling in love and “check them against accepted diagnostic criteria for mental illness, we find that most ‘lovers’ qualify for diagnoses of obsessional illness, depression or manic depression.” Other symptoms include insomnia, hyperactivity, and loss of appetite. Ah, ain’t love grand? Northwestern University psychologist Eli Finkel describes how falling in love can “make otherwise normal people do very wild things. They’ll stalk, hack into e-mail, eavesdrop and do other things they’d never do in a rational frame of mind.” Helen Fisher, an evolutionary anthropologist, explains that the elevated dopamine levels experienced during the rush of falling in love can drive us to take risks that might otherwise seem unthinkable.* So love really does conquer all, and not always in a good way.